Quick question: was Thief: The Dark Project (1998) the first to ship hardware HRTF with geometry-driven occlusion/obstruction via Aureal A3D 2.0, or did Half-Life’s A3D 2.0 update beat it to release? I’m hashing this out in the audio bay after poking old Miles/DS3D paths, so if anyone has ship-date notes or dev docs to confirm, I’d love the receipts.
I only ever heard true geometry occlusion after Half-Life’s A3D 2.0 patch in early ’99 on a Vortex2; Thief (’98) stuck to DS3D/EAX, not A3D 2.0 “wavetracing.” If you’ve still got HL, launch with -console and set s_use_a3d 1 — the console used to show “A3D 2.0” and you can hear occlusion through walls, while Thief’s user.cfg never exposed that. Do you have a Thief patch note that explicitly says “A3D 2.0”?
It’s interesting how a game like Thief, known for its stealth mechanics, didn’t leverage A3D 2.0 at launch. Maybe they were keeping audio spooky on purpose! Any chance your dev docs might shed light on their audio strategies?
, this drives me nuts too! From what I remember, Thief did have some solid audio work, but it was more about atmosphere than exploiting A3D 2.0 right at launch. I think Half-Life’s update really took that to another level.